How do I reconcile project time expenses recorded as time costs on a project with project direct expenses in the project profitability report?

Thank you, AlexV.

The matter really is that when you have time tracked against a project that you do not want to bill as a direct cost to a client, but want to bill the firm, which in turn, bills the client as negotiated, then you end up double counting in the project overview, in which you have the time costs captured as tracked, and the consultants' invoices on these same time costs as billed to the firm.

The project profitability report, however, only captures the time-based consultants invoices, which is fine since these are actually the absolute costs on the assignments.

At this point I'm wondering whether it is not, in fact, a good idea that the two are kept separate since in the project overview, you are able to pick up the actual cost of the project, which frequently includes time that a consultant may have put into the project but which they are not able to get paid for because it is beyond the hours in their contract.

This way, while the project overview gives you the real cost of the project (after you deduct consultants' direct cost invoices from the total cost of the project), the project profitability report on the other hand gives you the accounting performance of the project.  A comparison of these two seems a good basis for project evaluation - especially with respect to how much the client paid for the project vis-a-vis how much it actually cost in reality irrespective of what caused the overruns.